Crash Test Dummies and Worship Choruses

Songs That Get Me Through

As an exvangelical in an interfaith marriage, I often feel like a weird amalgamation of things – including the music that forms the soundtrack for my life.

As I wrote for NPR several years ago, “secular music” was looked upon warily in my conservative Christian community, and I grew up with a scattershot awareness of pop music and culture.

But this week I was thinking about one song that managed to break through my sheltered existence in the early 1990s.

Created with imagine.art. Prompt inspired by the Crash Test Dummies: “a kid who came back to school with hair that had turned from black into bright white from when the cars had smashed so hard.”

I was thinking about the Crash Test Dummies weird, wild, and artfully titled 1993 song, Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm because it starts with a verse about a boy who “got into an accident and couldn’t come to school.”

This week, my son went back to school after two weeks away recovering from our serious car accident earlier this month. And unlike the boy in the Crash Test Dummies song, his hair did not suddenly turn “from black into bright white.”

Anybody remember this song?

As a 12 year-old attending a charismatic evangelical church in the Kansas City area - where people spoke in tongues, came to the front of the church to share “words from the Lord,” and occasionally danced in the aisles - I’d locked into something about the final verse.

The song describes a couple of unfortunate kids, including the car accident survivor, before turning to a story about a kid with strict parents who took him to a church where “they shook and lurched all over the church floor.”

Created with imagine.art. Prompt inspired by the Crash Test Dummies: “a kid whose parents make him go to a church where they shake and lurch all over the church floor”

It was strange to hear ourselves reflected in pop music, especially the kind I’d been warned was “the Devil’s music” and could be a path toward soul destruction.

In place of all of that was a whole world of hymns and praise choruses and children’s Sunday school tunes, worship music tapes that my mom listened to in the minivan, and Christian contemporary music that offered evangelical teens like me an alternative to rock music.

It was one of those songs that I turned to the first night after our car accident, as my son lay in the children’s hospital nearby, being monitored for internal bleeding.

I had my own broken bones and was too injured to sleep on the window seat in his hospital room, so his father stayed with him that first night. Propped up with pillows in my own bedroom, I struggled to sleep as I worried about my son and relived the accident over and over again.

“He’s My Son,” by the Christian singer Mark Schultz tells the story of a sick little boy from the perspective of his father, anxiously thinking about both the boy and his worried mother. I first heard it in college around the time it was released in 2000 - long before I had my own children. But even then, I was moved - partly by the raw fragility it expresses and partly by the prayer, “Can you hear me?” - a question that felt relevant to me then and still does today.

I grabbed my phone off the nightstand and played it and finally - after hours powering through in what the EMT who helped us described as “Mama Bear” mode - was able to cry.

One other song that’s meant a lot to me in recent days is one that 19-year-old me, listening to Mark Schultz in my evangelical college dorm, wouldn’t have predicted.

It’s a beautiful Jewish prayer for healing, set to music by the late songwriter Debbie Friedman, who battled her own health challenges for many years, and whose music is sung today in many Jewish congregations.

She’s perhaps best known for her setting of the Mi Shebeirach, in which she prays for the renewal of both body and spirit.

It’s a prayer that holds out hope for physical healing while accepting the reality that it may not come.

It’s a difficult tension to hold during those dark nights, when you’re not sure if anyone is listening, and you need help.

I’m so grateful that my son and I are recovering well and moving toward normal activities. I wrote this on the train to Washington, where I’ll be helping with coverage of the second Republican presidential debate and guest hosting Morning Edition on Friday.

By the way, I go into many of these themes in much greater depth in my forthcoming book, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church. I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering it here. Thank you!